ISLAMABAD, April 20: Only by changing his words, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee seems to have dampened hopes he himself had generated by offering to resume deadlocked peace talks with Pakistan.

But diplomatic and political analysts said on Sunday that despite the scepticism that had set in, Pakistan was likely to seize upon Mr Vajpayee’s offer to press on for a dialogue that India has refused in the past because of what it calls Pakistan-aided “cross-border terrorism” in Kashmir.

Pakistan welcomed the offer within hours after Mr Vajpayee made it on Friday during a visit to the troubled Indian-held part of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir.

But the analysts said some optimism generated by the move, which Pakistan immediately welcomed, evaporated when he repeated the offer the next day but again raised the issue of Islamabad’s alleged support for Kashmiri groups fighting Indian rule for more than 13 years.

Mr Vajpayee made the surprise offer on Friday in a speech to a public rally in Indian-ruled Kashmir’s summer capital of Srinagar by saying he wanted talks with Pakistan as well as Kashmiri groups, without making any reference to India’s previous pre-condition that Islamabad first stop helping the militants.

But, while wounding up his two-day visit to Kashmir on Saturday, he told a news conference in Srinagar that he would see “what concrete steps Pakistan takes” and said: “As long as cross-border terrorism is going on and militants are preparing to cross the border...fruitful talks cannot happen.”

That appeared to be a reiteration of his previous pre- condition for talks he chose not to mention in his speech to a Kashmiri crowd, many of whom were bused to a heavily-guarded stadium by the state government elected last year on a promise of bringing peace after 13 years of anti-India revolt.

Some analysts saw India’s move as only a window-dressing ahead of the latest US shuttle diplomacy to the region to ease tensions between the two nuclear rivals rather than a serious initiative for dialogue, which has eluded the two sides since the collapse of a summit between President Pervez Musharraf and Mr Vajpayee in 2001 in the northern Indian city of Agra.

After the Agra failure, India has repeatedly rejected Pakistan’s offers to resume the dialogue and even refused to attend a summit of the seven-nation South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation that was to have been held in Islamabad in January.

Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri has said Pakistan will give a new date for the SAARC summit that he hopes will help lower temperature in South Asia.

That will put Mr Vajpayee to test — whether to come to Islamabad for the summit and, on its sidelines, have bilateral talks with Pakistan as he has offered, or stay away and abort the conference as had happened in January.

Other helpful gestures by New Delhi could be to agree to re-posting of High Commissioners (ambassadors) at each other’s capitals in place of only acting High Commissioners now in place, pave the way for a resumption of severed road, rail and air links between the two and allow the Indian cricket team to play against Pakistan.

Akram Zaki, a retired senior Pakistani diplomat, said Mr Vajpayee’s Srinagar speech had two aims: to dissuade Kashmiris from militancy by creating an impression of hope for them and to show to the American administration that New Delhi is not an “obstructing party”.

He said India’s charge that Pakistan was helping infiltration of guerrillas into Kashmir did not carry much weight because of the presence of about 700,000-strong Indian forces in Kashmir and its refusal to accept international observers to monitor the Line of Control there.

“But still it is a welcome thing...and a voice of reason,” he said about the Indian offer, which he said could be meaningful only if it were not spoiled by what he called hawkish members of Mr Vajpayee’s cabinet like Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha and Defence Minister George Fernandes.

“We hope these words are followed by deeds and lead to a start of meaningful negotiations to resolve the issue (of Kashmir),” said Zaki, a former secretary-general of the ministry of foreign affairs and a former Pakistan’s ambassador to China.

“We must pick up whatever is available,” said analyst Ayaz Amir, adding: “If something has come from the Indian side, however ambiguous, it should be seized.”

But he said if the past three and a half years of “the most barren and potentially dangerous phase” in the India-Pakistan relationship” were any guide, “the chances are that this initiative will also lead to nowhere”.